


Reflection

by Toffle



Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: Ambiguous Warrior of Light (Final Fantasy XIV), Character Study, Existentialism, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, POV Second Person, Reflecting on death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-08
Updated: 2020-07-08
Packaged: 2021-03-04 20:02:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,724
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25152082
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Toffle/pseuds/Toffle
Summary: You find it strange to think that there lies a timeline in which you died.---An existential reflection on things that have been lost and found after Shadowbringers. Character study of the Warrior of Light.
Relationships: G'raha Tia | Crystal Exarch & Warrior of Light, G'raha Tia | Crystal Exarch/Warrior of Light
Comments: 6
Kudos: 27





	Reflection

**Author's Note:**

> Do you ever wonder if the WoL ever thinks about their alternate self? Not the Ardbert, WoL/D of the First, who aided them through Shadowbringers, but their own self in the doomed timeline where the Eighth Umbral Calamity happened, that the Crystal Exarch fought to prevent happening in this one. The timeline where everyone was lost, and now only exists to maintain a time loop.

You find it strange to think that there lies a timeline in which you died. Oh, you’ve considered it before, of course. Death, that is. There’s little avoidance of the thought when so often you find yourself pit against the odds, the expectation to save the world - _worlds_ \- heavy on your shoulders.

Yes. You’re used to thoughts of death. Not so much a morbid fascination or a tendency towards the morose, but as a reality. Unavoidable. Eventual.

But it’s not _your_ death that grips your mind presently, and takes your thoughts through cycles. It’s another you. The ‘you’ that lost their life in the Eighth Umbral Calamity. Yourself, a timeline removed, who lived a life knowing that their dearest friend, one of the few people in the world to see them as a _person_ and not as an icon, slept in a sealed tower they could never enter.

 _That_ 'you' died alongside their friends and their comrades in a fruitless fight, never to meet again, never to learn of one anothers fates as the First rejoined with the Source. Never to see the world that would become the one your G’raha Tia awoke to. 

Alone.

How must that have felt to wake and learn the knowledge of all that was lost? A tale told by a generation of surviving descendents, two-hundred years from your slumber and the end of the world. How must that have felt to have slept with the expectation of waking to a world without your friends, but _not like this_. Not in the way that you imagined. A way far worse.

So far from your G’raha Tia’s expectations, and even your own. Both yourself, and your departed version.

And how strange to think that this is what would set the wheels in motion for ‘time-travel’, of all things!

More than that, by some divine stroke of luck, _your_ timeline was the one the Crystal Exarch created. Because that’s what happened, isn’t it? In travelling backwards to a time where you, and your brethren, and your kin still live. To a time where the Crystal Exarch stood the chance to prevent all of your ends. To here and now where you were ripped through space-time itself and into the First.

How many other timelines lie out there if they can be split, and changed, and altered?

How many versions of yourself exist in alternate realities where you were never the Warrior of Light. Where no one called to you for aid. Where you lived quietly...

And that’s not to even begin to touch on Hydaelyn's Reflections themselves. The Source, the First, Second, Third— How many counterparts, and how many altered realities of timelines where _their_ lives were not lost?

Perhaps there is even a timeline where G’raha Tia never sealed themselves inside the tower. Where perhaps you journeyed together, lived lives together. Kept promises and hopes and— Did they too fall to the Eighth in that timeline? Were you there to bear witness, to die by their side?

You smack your head against the table and the cutlery rattles. Blessedly, there’s no one around to witness your deterioration into an unresolved existential crisis, but you ought to gather your wits about you. This thought path leads way only to madness and a headache. As if any of this hasn’t already.

Oh, but your head does ache something wicked. Perhaps the hardwood did little to help, but it hardly makes a difference now. Not when the thoughts persist despite the way you pinch your nose and turn your face into the palm of your hand to seek out the darkness.

 _This_ is the timeline where you were blessed to see your dearest friend again. _This_ is the timeline where you have seen the heavy weight left upon the Exarch’s heart. Of what the responsibility of the First, and the fight to prevent the Eighth Calamity scarred him with. Of what an eon twinned to the tower has done to flesh and bone, and to G’raha Tia’s sense of self. Of the family it has given him, though none so close as to know him by name.

He should rest. Plainly speaking, so should you, but you were never one to be at ease. Time, ironically, has not been kind. It has… worn on you.

And what of yourself, three hundred years deceased if the maths works out? All these events are something unknown to the Warrior of Light of that doomed timeline. They were battles and revelations never learnt. A life lost at the end of the world. But in kind, G’raha Tia too woke to battles lost, with the knowledge that his friends were dead and that time had passed and the world was laid to ruin. 

It’s a pity in that there seems to be no outcome without a loss. A penalty. A price.

Even you, with little context for a history you have never experienced nor witnessed, have lost here too.

But not in the same ways.

In this timeline, in the here and now of the present, you try to wrap your mind around the fact that G’raha Tia travelled through _time and space_. How he waited, **_waited_ ** , one-hundred years for you to simply _exist_. How he waited with knowledge that in one lifetime you were dead, and in this, you hadn’t yet made a mark upon the world. All of this, so G’raha Tia could call you here to the First. That it was you, above all others, that your dearest friend toiled for in sheer belief and trust to stand by his side and make right these wrongs.

His inspiration. 

It aches. Not just your head, but the weary throb behind your eyes, and yet -

In the version of your alternate-self’s timeline, doomed as it was, _that_ Warrior would never know what became of G’raha Tia. They’d never know what he sacrificed. What role he took on beneath the cowl. They’d never know that not just one, but _two_ , worlds were saved. And by the crystalline hand that G’raha Tia reached out to you with, at that.

The Source.

The First.

Both safe, for now.

Another ward you must take into your fold and protect, though not alone. Never alone. 

The people of the First, Lakeland, the Crystarium, hold the Crystal Exarch so fondly in their hearts. _Their_ hero. Not you. Though they laude your heroics as the Warrior of Darkness, and hold you aloft as their hero, you are not the person who raised this city from nothing into something over the course of a century. 

G’raha Tia stood at their side across a generation. The Crystal Exarch. The one who worked, who strived. The man that earnt the love of its people and built this haven from the scorching light.

Your heart swells with pride. Your dearest friend. Awake, and alive, and so much in the hearts of yourself and the many.

You curl your head into your arms and count the chipped flecks of wood in the table top. The day has been long, and yet still your mind will not rest. You spiral onwards.

From this, at the end of it all, this is the timeline you could _almost_ consider lucky. For all the Warrior past lacks in knowledge, you hold in immediate memory. Images of lavender and fire and starlight and _light_. Of new friends, and old. Lost, and gained, and found. 

Histories, and horrors.

Their hopes.

You were here to save the Source and the First. You were here to prevent a Calamity seen only in the eyes of your former self. You were there to be called by, and to call for, G’raha Tia in return. You were there to receive back your most cherished friend from what you had assumed to be an eternity apart. The end, before it had even the chance to begin.

T’was good to see him awake.

T’was better to call his name again and see what it meant for him to be _seen_ again. To be known.

The man beneath the cowl. Your Raha. 

You were ‘lucky’. Everything you, and he, worked to save and protect. You have this.

For a time.

You bite your lip and taste the bitter sting of a wound not yet healed, because the efforts to send your friends back to the Source... In all you, and they, have done to keep G’raha Tia alive. To scold him of his self-sacrificial tendencies. To argue for his word to **_stay_ ** alive... 

Not one of you can predict this new future. Not so far as to matter. It’s wholly unknown along the stretch of this new timeline. Uncharted waters with a fresh threat on the horizon, as always. The one constant in your life, that there is always a new threat to face.

You are tired.

What will it cost to return your friends home safely, when all is said and done?

Will you lose your dearest friend once again? And not just you. You can’t think to be so selfish as to forget those here, but will the people of the First who hold the Crystal Exarch so dear lose him also?

Your heart aches to think this reunion could all be for naught.

That maybe, in that smallest of sense, the former Warrior of Light, buried and lost in a doomed timeline as they were, was perhaps in their own way ‘lucky’? _They_ can’t have their heart broken again. Their timeline is long past, and split from this path in the sole order that it might circle back to ensure this timeline exists at all in the first place!

Time and travel and space and time again, a hammer upon your skull.

A headache.

A heartache.

But truly...

There is no use dwelling on the what-if’s. You can only push forward, and you can only do what you can — what you must — to ensure the safety of your friends. _All_ of your friends. G’raha Tia will not be lost to you again.

By the Twelve you swear it. 

By yourself, you honour it. 

You owe them that. The ‘you’ who will never know your Raha’s smile again. The you who lost it all in the timeline that allowed this moment, this present, to exist.

As with the Ascians. As with so many lost.

You will remember.

You must.

**Author's Note:**

> I started playing FFXIV early last year, before I realised I wouldn't be able to afford to keep playing. I never managed to reach the G'raha Tia storyline, but I watched all the playthroughs because I wanted to know more. I'm not used to trying to write in the style that FFXIV uses for narration, so thank you for bearing with this, and I hope you enjoyed reading!


End file.
